“Other kinds of emotions”: Ishiguro’s Late-Modernist Affect

Kazuo Ishiguro’s most experimental novel, The Unconsoled (1995), features the travails of its narrator-protagonist Ryder, a distinguished concert-pianist visiting an unnamed Central European city sometime in the late twentieth century. The novel foregrounds Ryder’s minor emotions of irritation and anxiety as they are manifested side by side with his semi-amnesia, his cognitive dissonance, and his occasionally altered states of consciousness. But the novel’s epistemological uncertainties, together with its circular formal structure, its temporal instability, and its disconcertingly wild causality, articulate an anxiety in or of narrative itself. And yet, irritation and anxiety do not remain quietly within the framework of narrative form. These affects, firstly, infect the novel’s characters, and secondly, through their affectively contagious quality, its readers, who are often left irritated and anxious by the novel’s seemingly interminable vicissitudes. The Unconsoled suggests that the governing emotions of late modernism are the non-redemptive minor affects of irritation and anxiety.